Many two coloured checkered board puzzles and games of the type involving the assembly of a number of different pieces have been developed in the past but most such puzzles and games provide a fairly limited challenge. Examples of such puzzles are disclosed in the publication COMPENDIUM OF CHECKER BOARD PUZZLES by JERRY SLOCUM AND JACQUES HAUBRICH published August 1993. Further examples are shown in the FRANSEN 1930 U.S. Pat. No. 1,752,248 relating to an educational puzzle, an 1892 U.K. Patent No 16810 relating to a checkerboard puzzle and LUERS 1880 U.S. Pat. No. 2,319,63 relating to a sectional checkered board puzzle. Even though their challenge itself may be formidable in certain cases, the puzzles or games often lose part of their appeal after the challenge has been met.
The area of mathematics dealing with polyominoes is called combinatorial geometry and information relating to such games and puzzles, including pentominoes, may be found in the publication "Polyominoes" by Solomon W. Golomb (1965). A puzzle comprising a rectangular board composed of twelve pentominoes is disclosed in the 1959 U.S. Pat. No. 2,900,190 to Pestieau. A 1993 Pentominoes game marketed by the Binary Arts Corporation Inc. builds on Golomb's 1965 work. The 1976 U.S. Pat. No. 3,964,749 to Wadsworth also discloses a puzzle involving pentominoes for a rectangular board of ninety squares.
Many puzzles have also been constructed over the past century that involve the cutting up of a standard chess board in any number of pieces and each piece can comprise a varying number of squares. These pieces include pentominoes as well as higher or lower order polyominoes. In any of these puzzles, the test is to reassemble the chess board out of its constituent pieces. No relationship has ever been established between an obverse side and a reverse side of the puzzle pieces. Whenever the pieces were coloured in a checkered pattern on both sides, the colouring was either identical or the exact opposite. No difference between the obverse and reverse sides has ever been demonstrated nor has the interchange of colours (and patterns) between pieces from the obverse and reverse of the puzzle ever been alluded to.